The Only Rule Is
by Limelight
Summary: She should really find a better place to keep her heart, because there’s a war on and her sleeve is getting dangerous. [MinervaTom]


**Disclaimer: **Still not mine.

**Summary: **She should really find a better place to keep her heart, because there's a war on and her sleeve is getting dangerous. (Minerva/Tom)

**AN: **I have nothing to say for myself

**-**

**The Only Rule Is**

-

Minerva's a mudblood. She reads muggle novels in the hallways, pressed up against the stone, and none of the pictures in her dormitory move.

Minerva's a mudblood, but she's also a prefect and that means they _have_ to listen to her. She sometimes feels like the title is a shield, which is ridiculous because it's only seven letters and far too small.

She's unique in that she's the only one who keeps her original badge, the one mailed to her before fifth year, doesn't ever need to have it replaced or fixed. And she should really find a better place to keep her heart, her mother tells her, because there's a war on and her sleeve is getting dangerous.

Tom's just a little boy, with someone else's name and someone else's clothes. (And he's really only thirteen to Minerva's sixteen, but they're in a school with classes and years and things having a way of becoming magnified.) He smiles at her in the hallway and oh – it has _teeth._

-

Wizard families don't ever name their children until well after their first birthday. It's a tradition dating all the way to the Middle Ages; back then children died more often than they lived and it didn't do to become attached. (Because it was also believed that you could die of a broken heart.)

It has absolutely no bearing today, Minerva knows. There are no plagues anymore, and you'd be hard-pressed to find skeletons in ditches, bodies in shallow graves. But the wizards do it anyways, because it's always been an uncertain world and maybe you _can_ still die of a broken heart. (Only these days they would call it other things. Like suicide.)

-

They play hide and seek and jump rope because they're still children, and Quidditch because they're trying not to be. Sometimes Tom flies too close to her. He's not afraid, even though she's bigger and she has a bat and he _should _be.

He flies next to her, parallel, when Minerva feints and turns and dives. It's a bit like he knows what she's going to do before she does it, and eventually Minerva gives up and lets him play her shadow (except then she wonders if she's the one playing his).

At the end of the game, he catches her wrist and its all kinds of inappropriate because they've just beaten him, and what gameis _he_ playing? His hand is cold, freezing

-

Minerva likes chess.

She enjoys moving the pieces, controlling them, using a strategy. She's very good at knowing who to sacrifice.

Minerva likes chess, but then she meets Albus Dumbledore. And she doesn't like it so much anymore.

Because it's not nearly as fun if your pieces can bleed.

-

This is how Minerva knows about Tom:

"I'm not sure," he tells her conversationally. "You tell me."

And then he slashes his palm with the pocket knife, scarlet on the snow. He cuts the first year's next, a Gryffindor and a Pureblood, and the blood pools next to his, red like carnations. Minerva's shaking and Tom has her wand.

"No, I suppose you really can't tell," she says.

In the rush to the hospital wing, Minerva ends up carrying the little boy because Tom cut just that much too deep and she can see bone. When all is done, she stands in the hallway, covered in his drying blood. (And Tom is right, because when she looks through the window back across the dirtied snow, she can't tell which is which.)

-

Tom Riddle has always had someone else's name and someone else's clothes, and he kills his father so he can have something of his own. (He owns a bit of Minerva already, but she has all the rest and he doesn't quite know what to do with the part he's got.)

Hogwarts is nothing more than a playing board for Dumbledore and his chess sets, and Minerva is walking away.

(The old man doesn't look at all surprised when she boomerangs back to him, just a few years later.)

-

Time slides by on alibis and wintertimes and Minerva is no longer sixteen. There is another war and her sleeve is still too dangerous. Mostly she keeps her heart under lock and key.

A baby is born, and Lily isn't a Pureblood and doesn't understand about traditions. James insists that they _wait_, just for a little, but she laughs and calls him Harry anyways. James refuses to let it be made official, however, and never once addresses his son by name. (And maybe there's something to be said about the fact that, years later, Minerva will still be able to see the lost look in the child's eyes.)

Lilly and James are killed before anything can be signed, and, if you check the birth certificate of the boy who lived, there's nothing but a white space, blank and barren, the place where a name should be.

-

Minerva's still a mudblood and there's something in the corridors, children like frozen statues, right out of a fairytale, messages about chambers and blood on the walls. She's the Headmistress now, but it's a puppet title and there will be no hiding behind it. Twelve letters is still not enough.

"I wouldn't kill you, 'Nerva," says Tom in a dream that might not be. She can see the sky through his arm.

He kisses her sleeve (and Minerva realizes that she forgot to lock the box that keeps her heart).

_-fin-_


End file.
